‘Thoughtful and Diligent’ Judge to Decide Penalty in Akai Gurley’s Death

Justice Danny K. Chun during Officer Peter Liang’s trial in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn. The judge is scheduled to sentence Mr. Liang this week in the fatal shooting of Akai Gurley in the stairwell of a housing project.Credit
Pool photo by Anthony Lanzilote

In the past few weeks, there has been a lot of talk around the Brooklyn courts about what Justice Danny K. Chun will do when he takes the bench on Thursday to sentence Peter Liang, the former police officer convicted two months ago in the fatal shooting of Akai Gurley in a housing project stairwell.

Some lawyers say Justice Chun, 54, of State Supreme Court is likely to follow the Solomonic path cleared for him by Ken Thompson, the Brooklyn district attorney, who pursued Mr. Liang on manslaughter charges but then softened the conviction by suggesting in a letter last month that he face no time in prison. Others say that Justice Chun has no choice but to jail Mr. Liang, and that even a brief prison term would send a tough message compared with Mr. Thompson’s recommendation.

But in the fractious world of the Brooklyn bar, where seven lawyers might have eight opinions, there seemed to be agreement on one issue: that Justice Chun was singularly suited to render a decision in the complicated case.

“He’s a very contemplative, thoughtful and diligent judge — no-nonsense in his demeanor,” said Michael Farkas, the president of the Kings County Criminal Bar Association, which is honoring Justice Chun at a gala on Saturday. “There are some highly emotional feelings about this case, as everybody knows. But bottom line: I know for a fact that he will do the right thing as he sees fit.”

Born in Seoul, Danny Chun came to New York with his family in 1973. They settled first in Elmhurst, Queens, then moved to nearby Bayside, where his father worked as a real-estate broker before becoming a minister. A driven and religious man himself, according to his friends, Mr. Chun attended Johns Hopkins University and obtained degrees in political science and philosophy. He went on to the Fordham University School of Law and upon graduation, in 1987, joined the Manhattan district attorney’s office as its first Korean-American prosecutor.

Photo

The Brooklyn district attorney has indicated that Mr. Liang, seen entering court in February, should receive no jail time.Credit
Bryan R. Smith for The New York Times

While working at the district attorney’s office, where he handled homicides and Asian gang cases, Mr. Chun once returned to Fordham Law for a student career day and found himself as one of the few public servants in a room of corporate lawyers.

“I still remember what he spoke about that day,” said Chad Sjoquist, a former Fordham student who became a lawyer and, eventually, a friend of Justice Chun’s. “He said: ‘If you want to sit at a desk all day and make lots of money, go work at a firm. But if you want to do something interesting and something that matters, become a D.A.’”

In 1999, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani plucked Mr. Chun from his supervisory job at the district attorney’s office and appointed him to Brooklyn Criminal Court. A few years later, Judge Chun had his first high-profile case: the harassment trial of the pornographer Al Goldstein, the publisher of Screw magazine.

With its scatological references (and a defendant who liked to dress in a white leather jacket with a set of stars and stripes), the trial was frequently absurd, although Judge Chun proved himself throughout to be sober and unflappable. At one point during jury selection, a potential member of the panel said she was uncomfortable with the uncouth language that kept emerging in court.

“I’m not asking if you’re comfortable or uncomfortable,” Judge Chun told her. “If you’re selected as a juror, are you going to be able to judge the case fairly and justly?”

In 2005, he was promoted to State Supreme Court, where he now handles many of Kings County’s rackets and police misconduct matters. He is currently presiding over the case of two Brooklyn officers charged in a 2014 assault after a security camera captured them beating a 16-year-old boy, Kahreem Tribble, during an arrest. He is also hearing the long-running legal ordeal of John Giuca, who for nearly a decade has been trying to overturn his conviction in the 2003 murder of Mark Fisher, a Connecticut college student killed in Brooklyn.

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Justice Chun is also hearing the long-running case of John Giuca, who has been trying to overturn his conviction in the 2003 murder of Mark Fisher, a college student killed in Brooklyn.Credit
Pool photo by Chang W. Lee

Justice Chun is not known for an effusive personality, and over the years he has built a reputation for being objective and evenhanded.

“He doesn’t strike me as an affable, knock-around kind of guy, but he’s fair, smart and very well respected,” said Steven Brounstein, a veteran defense lawyer who has appeared before the justice several times. “And, of course, he’s liked by all sides in the courthouse.”

The sentencing of Mr. Liang — the most prominent and, perhaps most troublesome, of Justice Chun’s career — will put those qualities to the test. Though caught up in the furor over the death of Eric Garner, who died after being put in a police chokehold in July 2014 on Staten Island, the Gurley case never neatly fit the narrative of other police killings of unarmed black men around the country.

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There was no confrontation or direct interaction between Mr. Liang and Mr. Gurley, who died from a ricocheting bullet that Mr. Liang fired while on patrol in November 2014 in a dark stairwell of the Louis H. Pink Houses in East New York. And the prosecutors who tried Mr. Liang acknowledged that while he acted recklessly and failed to help his victim after the bullet struck, there was no evidence that he meant to kill or even injure Mr. Gurley.

Beyond those facts, the case was politicized almost from the moment it began. For Mr. Thompson, a Democrat who is Brooklyn’s first black district attorney, that meant balancing his sense of justice and the evidence against competing constituencies in the New York Police Department and in the city’s black community, which immediately called for Mr. Liang to be charged.

Some lawyers have said that Justice Chun will now face similar pressures. As the city’s first Korean-American judge, he has faced impassioned calls — mostly in the form of petitions and letters to the court — from New York’s Asian-American community to show leniency to Mr. Liang, who is of Chinese heritage.

“The undertone of race here just adds one more page to the script of how this all plays out,” Arthur L. Aidala, the president of the Brooklyn Bar Association, said. “But of every justice I know in New York, Chun has the background — and the backbone — to do what he feels is right.”

A version of this article appears in print on April 13, 2016, on Page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Diligent’ Judge to Decide Penalty in Killing by Police. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe